Look Who's Got The Bomb

By Johanna McGeary

Trial lawyers preach a cardinal principle: never ask a question to which you don't know the answer. Diplomats generally operate on the same basis. So when the Bush Administration presented evidence to North Korean leaders on Oct. 3 that their country was developing nuclear weapons, it expected the regime to lie about it. A day later came the shocker. Yes, we've been secretly working to produce nukes, a top aide to "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il told astonished U.S. envoy James Kelly. And, he added, we've got "more powerful" weapons--presumably meaning biological and chemical agents--to boot. He was not apologetic at all, says a U.S. official, but "assertive, aggressive about it."

Tightly controlled countries like North Korea typically stonewall such sensitive inquiries. So the admission did more than just confirm long-held suspicions in Washington that North Korea, a charter member in Bush's "axis of evil," had pursued weapons of mass destruction despite a 1994 agreement to stop. The revelation also jerked a preoccupied world to attention. Why, everyone wondered, was Kim confessing now? And why had Bush pressed the issue, when he was already immersed in two major global confrontations? No wonder the Administration sat on the news for 12 days while it scrambled to figure out how to downsize the crisis. By the time the Bush team went public with the news last week, it was also trying to reassure citizens and allies that this standoff would be addressed, at least for now, with diplomacy, not military might.

Mistrust of North Korea has been a bedrock U.S. policy since war on the Korean peninsula ended in 1953. Pyongyang's erratic behavior consistently confirms such skepticism. The latest confrontation was quite deliberate, says a senior Bush aide. For more than two years, the CIA had been collecting shards of information suggesting that North Korea was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons, despite the 1994 Agreed Framework requiring Pyongyang to freeze its program to extract plutonium from reprocessed reactor fuel. (The CIA has long thought that North Korea made--and kept--one or two plutonium-based bombs from before 1994.)

But North Korea apparently figured it could obtain nukes another way: using the slower but more easily hidden method of enriching uranium to weapons grade in gas centrifuges--the same method some now accuse Saddam Hussein of pursuing. To accomplish that, the reclusive North Koreans needed to buy know-how and equipment abroad, including high-strength aluminum for the whirling centrifuges. By late July, the CIA had picked up enough tip-offs to conclude that Pyongyang was procuring banned supplies. By late summer, a Bush aide says, "things fell in place, and we could say, Aha!"

So who assisted the Koreans? U.S. officials suspect Pakistan. China and Russia also make centrifuges, but surely neither wants a nuclear-armed North Korea next door. Islamabad and Pyongyang, however, made natural partners: Pakistan had the Bomb but no missiles to deliver it, and North Korea is the world's most active missile proliferator, especially to customers who can't shop elsewhere. In 1998 Pakistan tested a homemade Ghauri medium-range ballistic missile that the U.S. believes originated in North Korea.

That doesn't mean the deal was government to government. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf denies that his regime supplied Pyongyang's enrichment program. But in 1998 Washington slapped sanctions on the lab of Abdul Qadir Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's Bomb. As head of the nation's nuclear program, he made the Ghauri as a carbon copy of North Korea's Nodong missile, say U.S. officials. Khan is believed to have established front companies and smuggling operations to gather and sell nuclear gear and blueprints. Musharraf forced his resignation as the lab's leader 18 months ago.

The Bush Administration has flip-flopped on North Korea. It recently had agreed to resume talks with Pyongyang, suspended since early 2001. But when Assistant Secretary of State Kelly took off for North Korea in early October, the purpose of his mission had changed dramatically. The CIA had briefed Bush in August about its new intelligence on Pyongyang's secret enrichment program. The President decided to confront Kim with the evidence, but the Administration first shared it with several congressional leaders and key countries that the U.S. would need to help lean on Pyongyang: Japan, South Korea, China and Russia.

The stakes couldn't be higher. War with North Korea, Bush told his aides, was out of the question. He could not let Kim alter the fragile balance of power on the Korean peninsula, where 37,000 U.S. troops stand across the DMZ from a million-man army close enough to destroy Seoul, South Korea's capital, in a blitzkreig. By Bush's own doctrine of pre-emption, the U.S. should strike against any state with weapons of mass destruction and an irresponsible dictator. But the consequences of attacking Pyongyang are unacceptable. What Bush apparently never anticipated was a brazen admission that the evidence was right.

The conundrum of Kim, who succeeded his father Kim Il Sung eight years ago as North Korea's absolute ruler, has flummoxed Washington for years. The xenophobic leader can veer from aggressive hostility to quiet bids to mend relations with the outside world, particularly if other nations help leapfrog his poverty-stricken people into the modern era. Like his father, when Kim has been most desperate for foreign aid, he has used the rattle of nukes to frighten the U.S. and its allies into buying him off.

It was exactly that sort of brinksmanship that produced the 1994 agreement. When North Korea announced it would no longer abide by the nonproliferation treaty, the Clinton Administration effectively purchased peace by promising financial aid if North Korea would quit developing nukes. South Korea and Japan, the regional neighbors most eager to quell North Korea's malign power, gladly put up most of the cash. Critics complained the U.S. was giving in to nuclear extortion. North Korea, they warned, would unveil a threatening new capability whenever it wanted more aid. The latest disclosure proved the hard-liners right about one thing: Kim could not be trusted to live up to his agreements.

Yet all summer, even as the CIA tracked his nuclear activities, Kim was showing signs of opening the North's barbed-wire gates, economically and diplomatically. He edged in the direction of primitive market reforms and announced a grandiose scheme for a private-enterprise zone along the border with China. Just as intriguing was the sudden burst of sunshine from Pyongyang diplomats as they clamored to hold talks with Seoul, Tokyo and even Washington. Soon after a shoot-out with Seoul's patrol boats that left five dead, the North scheduled its first tete-a-tete with the South in nine months.

Then came Kim's strange confessional meeting with Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in September. Although U.S. envoys by then had briefed Koizumi on the CIA discovery, it's unclear how hard he pressed Kim on the issue. The Korean leader one-upped his counterpart by apologizing for kidnapping 13 Japanese citizens decades ago to train North Korean spies. He perhaps hoped the startling act of contrition would open the way to more aid from Japan. Koizumi said last week he would keep working to normalize relations.

The Bush Administration remains deeply skeptical about Kim's motivations, and debate rages over what his acknowledgement of the nuclear program portends. He remains firmly in charge of his country, but there's no question that it is in dire shape. Few have enough to eat, and 45% of children under the age of 5 suffer chronic malnutrition. Farms lie fallow without fertilizer, and at least 6 million of North Korea's 22 million people depend on international food aid. Most factories are closed and rusting for lack of power, and the only things lit at night in the North's drab cities are grandiose statues of Kim Il Sung. Hospitals have no heat, no disinfectant, no anesthetic, no rubber gloves. Kim devotes nearly a third of North Korea's GDP to military spending, and finances ridiculous Pharaonic projects, such as the 105-story Ryugyong hotel that towers unfinished over Pyongyang.

Some experts suggest that as North Korea's rigid system breaks down around him, Kim is reaching clumsily for reform. Many in South Korea and Japan interpret last week's confession as a clearing of the decks, kicking over the old framework to negotiate a new, more stable one. But others point to Kim's history of trading momentary friendship and empty promises for monetary assistance: he's just giving the world another head fake.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shrugged off any notion that Kim's confession augurs real change. "I don't think there's any way in the world anyone could say it's a good sign," he said. In the short term, hard-liners inside the Administration will resist rewarding Kim for giving up weapons. While the U.S. is not prepared to fight a three-front war, there are plenty of Bush advisers who believe North Korea's arsenal can't be dismantled without regime change--and they will come back to the argument once Iraq is behind them.

The White House sees a possible opening for a form of coercive diplomacy, with which Washington would convince North Koreans that, as a top White House aide puts it, "they will pay too heavy a price if they pursue this nuclear approach." The 1994 framework is effectively dead. Pyongyang can no longer sell off its threats piecemeal. New U.S. demands will sweep across the spectrum of security issues, including a pullback of conventional forces from the DMZ. If Kim doesn't buckle, Washington will make its weight felt by cutting off outside aid except for humanitarian assistance. The risk, warns Gary Samore, a Clinton Administration National Security Council director on nonproliferation, is that Bush's tough-love diplomacy may bring on a deep chill as "existing limits on nuclear activity evaporate."

Bush hopes the threat of a nuclear North Korea will galvanize South Korea, Japan, China and Russia to join the U.S. in a united front that can pressure Pyongyang to disarm. They have never agreed, however, on the best way to end North Korea's isolation. "The diplomacy of this is tricky," says the Bush aide. Yet the implications of confrontation show negotiations have got to be tried. --Reported by Donald Macintyre/Seoul, J.F.O. McAllister/London and Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by Donald Macintyre/Seoul, J.F.O. McAllister/London and Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington